BIG SUMMER NIGHTS FOR SOCIAL NIHILISM

Post navigation

The assumption of all us here at Fun Social Nihilism is that you, the average screen-watching malcontent, are trying to recover a sense of reality after being subject to the 2016 American Democratic and Republican conventions. To the surprise of no one in the vast global audience, Fun Social Nihilism pronounces those conventions an absurd, pathetic, horrific waste of time, which its reporters mostly ignored, out of concern for the reporters’ sanity, their home lives, their wills to go on living.

The conventions were uniformly pestilent, awful, the worst example of humanity’s incessant herd-like fear instincts, but the commentary, even by fairly estimable critics like Jeffery St. Clair, good ol’ sermon-lover, at counterpunch, was also subject to strong whiffs of vapidity.

What did we expect? Human beings all over the world, even among the malcontents, say X when they think Y in order to get result Z. Drump, to be fair to the cause of righteousness, is an example of the consequences of not locking up white collar criminals when they first start their marauding depredations. The charges against Drump go back to his 20s – rape, extortion, criminal fraud, subordination, any number of enormously consequential white collar crimes that should have put him and the majority of hedge fund bankers and political bag-men and bribe-takers in some magnificent Norway prison. Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next illustrates the lives of these prisoners in Norway, and the response of Iceland to the banking crime wave in their country. Instead, these Mad Men sociopaths have arrogated to themselves the criminal approach to stealing the balance of the world’s money, and now one of them sits atop the political process.

The bilgefest and blatherama that were both the Republican and Democratic convention will be difficult to shake as embodying the worst of the American public sphere. Unremittances were everywhere; the unctuousness was above any previous meter. “God Bless” as every last closing stupidity, rampant and frothing militarism, unbelievable lying about personal saintliness of the wholly corrupt candidates, disgusting embrace of tragedy, complete abandonment of any standard of personal integrity by associating with such a boring, anti-intellectual cavalcade of ersatz sentimentality, vain self-ennoblements – though one speaker, of all of the murder mouthpieces, made the slightest bid for actual mental competence, the religious believer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The Sanders con was revealed, but should have been known – Sanders has long belonged to the criminal club known as the US Senate, and has genuflected to its fascist and paranoid imperatives long ago. His embrace of the Neoliberal Queen is part of that whoredom – how else to explain his capitulation to such an obvious fraud?

“USA-USA” did drown out the “No More Wars” chant, so let the good folks take that as a verdict. If it matters in the slightest, go ahead and vote for the anti-Trump candidate with the best chance of denying Liberty University its chance to supply the government with its moronic Christian apparatchiks. If you hold onto your conscience, then don’t vote, or write in Sara Wageknecht, or Gloria La Riva, or your pet monkey. Just be sure to cast your hopes away for any confrontation with the supersystem from either the overtly fascist Republicans or the Friendly Fascist Democrats, or the craven, hopeless Greens.

A better world was never promised, so if we have to disavow our political system, the way we might have had to internally disavow our work systems, or parental inheritances, or religious inheritances, or friends’ actions, then that is the price of being a human caught in systems we cannot alter. That degree is of antipathy and rage is hard to hold in today’s world of relationships and go-go-getting, but we here at Fun Social Nihilism are here to lead the way.

Thanks for the response. You got the conundrum perfectly. I’ll be checking out your stuff, having learned a new word from you title alone, and looking forward to your takes on the listing world from the PNW.